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The Largest Ship In the World Is Being Built In Korea
HughPickens.com writes Alastair Philip Wiper writes that at 194 feet wide and 1,312 feet long, the Matz Maersk Triple E is the largest ship ever built, capable of carrying 18,000 20-foot containers. Its propellers weigh 70 tons apiece and it is too big for the Panama Canal, though it can shimmy through the Suez. A U-shaped hull design allows more room below deck, providing capacity for 18,000 shipping containers arranged in 23 rows – enough space to transport 864 million bananas. The Triple-E is constructed from 425 pre-fabricated segments, making up 21 giant "megablock" cross sections. Most of the 955,250 liters of paint used on each ship is in the form of an anti- corrosive epoxy, pre-applied to each block. Finally, a polyurethane topcoat of the proprietary Maersk brand color "Hardtop AS-Blue 504" is sprayed on.
Twenty Triple-E class container ships have been commissioned by Danish shipping company Maersk Lines for delivery by 2015. The ships are being built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering factory in the South Korean port of Opko. The shipyard, about an hour from Busan in the south of the country, employs about 46,000 people, and "could reasonably be described as the worlds biggest Legoland," writes Wiper. "Smiling workers cycle around the huge shipyard as massive, abstractly over proportioned chunks of ships are craned around and set into place." The Triple E is just one small part of the output of the shipyard, as around 100 other vessels including oil rigs are in various stages of completion at the any time." The vessels will serve ports along the northern-Europe-to-Asia route, many of which have had to expand to cope with the ships' size. "You don't feel like you're inside a boat, it's more like a cathedral," Wiper says. "Imagine this space being full of consumer goods, and think about how many there are on just one ship. Then think about how many are sailing round the world every day. It's like trying to think about infinity."
Twenty Triple-E class container ships have been commissioned by Danish shipping company Maersk Lines for delivery by 2015. The ships are being built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering factory in the South Korean port of Opko. The shipyard, about an hour from Busan in the south of the country, employs about 46,000 people, and "could reasonably be described as the worlds biggest Legoland," writes Wiper. "Smiling workers cycle around the huge shipyard as massive, abstractly over proportioned chunks of ships are craned around and set into place." The Triple E is just one small part of the output of the shipyard, as around 100 other vessels including oil rigs are in various stages of completion at the any time." The vessels will serve ports along the northern-Europe-to-Asia route, many of which have had to expand to cope with the ships' size. "You don't feel like you're inside a boat, it's more like a cathedral," Wiper says. "Imagine this space being full of consumer goods, and think about how many there are on just one ship. Then think about how many are sailing round the world every day. It's like trying to think about infinity."
The dimensions of the Prelude FLNG is 488m x 74m (1,601ft x 243 ft), and thus it is way larger vessel than the Triple E. The hull was already launched last year. The only reason it is not the largest ship is that it does not have its own engines to propel itself.
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
Discovery Channel aired a series of programmes on this project last year. IIRC the main shipyard can house 2 or 3 of these in parallel, not 13. Each ship spends only a few months in this yard (final assembly only). Delivery tempo is one a month.
Modules are built at various other shipyards.
It's bullshit that they're building them in Korea, though.
We have perfectly capable, world-class shipyards in Denmark, practically begging to take on these kinds of tasks. In the old days, when Arnold Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller still ran the company, these orders would have gone to Danish companies. No more, now everything is outsourced to the lowest bidder.
Eat the rich.
Both this and the original source at Wired have the name of the Korean place wrong, it's "Okpo", not "Opko".
Signed, your local friendly Korean geography nazi.
These ships don't work like that. If anything, it will usually carry less than the max. The rating is based off of a arbitrary weight for each container which is about half the max weight per container. If overloaded or loaded incorrectly, they can list or even split. Here's two pictures of things that can happen:
http://www.railroad-line.com/f...
http://shariaunveiled.files.wo...
http://www.marineinsight.com/w...
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